Capitalist Profit Means Workers’ Lives

The following are the comments, edited for publication, of a Spartacist League speaker during the discussion period of the May 7 NYC forum.

Jacob mentioned the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of March 25, 1911. This industrial murder of 146 New York City garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, galvanized the labor movement in the city. The doors of the Triangle Shirtwaist sweatshop were locked by the owners, imprisoning garment workers in the factory as the fire raged. This is not uncommon. We had an article on Bangladeshi women garment workers in Workers Vanguard No. 974 [18 February] which lays this out, with scores of fires in factories where the doors were locked, constituting mass murder by factory owners. Those who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire were either consumed in the flames or leapt nine or ten stories to their death on the pavement below.

What we saw this year with the Triangle Shirtwaist centennial was that the Democratic Party used the occasion of this tragedy caused by capitalism to seek to present themselves as the friends of labor. This comes off the Republicans and Democrats taking a sledgehammer to the unions, making working people pay with their jobs, homes and meager social benefits to bail out the capitalist parasites whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s Great Depression.

The centennial event was held outside the factory where the fire occurred, and a team of comrades sold Workers Vanguard to a crowd of about 2,000 workers. We sold our papers easily on the front-page article on the anti-union onslaught in Wisconsin and the article on the Bangladeshi women garment workers. Various leading lights of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy spoke from the platform. While the Republicans revel in taking out the knife to slaughter the unions, the Democrats hand the knife to the union bureaucrats to slash the wages and benefits of their members in the name of “preserving collective bargaining.” The labor bureaucrats are so beholden to the capitalist order that even the notion that there is a working class in this country is deep-sixed, reflected in the constant refrain about the “middle class” and not the working class.

Speakers included Obama’s Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, who speechified about the importance of unions and then went on to evoke the 29 coal miners who died in West Virginia and the eleven oil workers who were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion. She intoned that the “Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business.” Certainly they are—enforcement of the Obama administration’s union-busting “sacrifice” to bail out Wall Street. There was a Laborers union bureaucrat who translated for a Latino laborer, who powerfully described working with no medical benefits, with doors padlocked and no bathrooms. Meanwhile, a worker whose hand was mangled was fired. What is desperately needed is a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions and the forging of a revolutionary workers party that will lead the working class in the overthrow of the American capitalist order, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a class and the establishment of a planned socialist economy.